Help Me … Help You!
Remember that funny scene and line from the film Jerry Maguire?
Premium Teacher Dashboard
It came to mind this morning when I came into the office early and participated in a major software release for VocabularySpellingCity. Today we launched a new system for teachers that makes VocabularySpellingCity much easier to use. I urge all premium teacher members to log in and look at the new dashboard. I predict, with some confidence, that you’ll love it. My confidence stems from the fact that it was designed and refined by a long series of discussions with our teacher users and has a 100% satisfaction rating from these teachers. When premium teachers log in, they now see this teacher dashboard.
For teachers who are not yet premium members, it’s past time to realize that you are missing the boat. The premium membership not only facilitates spelling practice and tests but enables transforming vocabulary into your students’ superpower. And your students’ comprehension problems have been attributed 70% to vocabulary problems (by the National Research Council). Improve students’ vocabulary retention, improve their comprehension and academic success.
For teachers who are buying VocabularySpellingCity themselves or who are still using only the free site, I repeat: Help Us Help You. Here are the steps:
- Contact us, and let’s talk about your school’s literacy challenges – most specifically, who in your school is in charge of improving reading comprehension scores.
- Put us in contact with that person and we’ll discuss putting together a high value, low cost solution for improving your students’ literacy skills. If your school or district feels that a pilot is necessary first, we’re willing to talk about it. Give us a call: (800) 357-2157 or [email protected]. BTW, you can also tweet us (@spellingcity) or show up unannounced at our Fort Lauderdale office (we’ve had several teachers do that recently, we loved it!).
Look, you all know that VocabularySpellingCity is the leader in empowering teachers and engaging students. Unlike other literacy programs which take students on independent individual learning paths, VocabularySpellingCity helps the teachers by providing a method to reinforce the key vocabulary and lessons being taught. The key point is that while you are largely teaching on a unit per week instructional cycle, this is inadequate spacing for students to retain, long term, the new vocabulary and concepts. VocabularySpellingCity provides teachers with a method to efficiently work the previous two to five weeks of lessons and vocabulary, which vastly improves retention. This is achieved just by reorganizing the use of the daily vocabulary literacy center and using VocabularySpellingCity. Here are the details on this.
VocabularySpellingCity directly helps the teacher by providing a simple method for reinforcement which leads to better vocabulary retention, better comprehension, and increased academic success. It is in stark contrast to all that automated learning path software which, while it does have its value, does NOT directly help teachers in the cycle of instruction and building retention.
On a closely related note, I’d like to point out that with VocabularySpellingCity, there is incredible momentum in our development of new benefits for schools and teachers. During this spring and summer:
- We launched a new student environment, which is also getting rave reviews. It’s easier to use and even more fun.
- We formulated our system for schools to address their No. 1 challenge: improving student comprehension for academic success.
- We provided, today, a new teacher dashboard that makes the wealth of VocabularySpellingCity features easily accessible by busy teachers. These features include:
- One-click importing of the word lists associated with major literacy programs such as Words Their Way, Journeys, Reading Street, and Reading Wonders.
- Easy customization of these lists or creation of others.
- One-click importing of thousands of Teacher Resource lists including Fry Words, Dolch Words, Academic Vocabulary, Math Vocabulary, Science Vocabulary, Social Studies Vocabulary, Figurative Language, and many, many more.
- Easy assignments by class, groups within a class, or by student.
- Automated review lists.
- Student-created lists.
- Reports convenient both for the class-at-a-glance and for deep dives on students to support discussions and AEPs.
Having listened closely to principals and teachers over the last half decade, I think we have a strong track record and stronger momentum to deliver the features that can make a significant difference to your school with minimal fuss in implementation. Our PD model is tuned and efficient as is our system for setting up your accounts. Schools and districts are pleased to hear that we are now also using the Clever software service for account implementation and updates!
So, thanks for your input, and I’m sure that you are going to like how a greatly improved VocabularySpellingCity is available for the new school year. We’re still at that same low price for schools – only $2 per student.
Which brings me back to my original point. While there are thousands of schools and districts around the country that have adopted VocabularySpellingCity school-wide, there are many more where individual teachers or grades are paying for VocabularySpellingCity out of their own pocket. There are teachers who have not licensed VocabularySpellingCity so they are making do with the free version (which they think is great, but that’s only because they’ve never really looked at what’s available on the other side of the Premium gate).
We do not have a nationwide feet-on-the-street account team, which is one of the reasons we can provide our services at such a low price. We depend on ongoing, strong word-of-mouth and advocacy by our users to make sure that the right people in the school systems are made aware of us and put in contact with us.
So, help us help you. Give us a call, and let’s talk about how we can support your school’s increased academic success.